Jack Sargeant, the 2008 curator of the Revelation Film Festival, describes the Danish fantasy/adventure film, Island of the Lost Souls, as “entertaining and fun… yet twisted, weird and a little subversive.” The film’s director, Nikolaj Arcel, seems reluctant to concur. When he hears this assessment, he laughs and then coyly admits, “I’d say the movie was actually a rather obvious homage to the kind of films that Hollywood does. I do try to infuse it with my own sense of humour, and a lot of heart and soul, but I think that it’s ultimately a very classical adventure film.”
Island of Lost Souls is, however, undeniably subversive in so much as it challenges our expectations of Danish cinema. Far removed from the more arthouse tendencies of Scandivian filmmakers (particularly those associated with the purity of the Dogma 95 film movement), this fast-paced, flashy, genre film is the last thing you’d expect from that corner of the globe. Arcel agrees, “It’s very different, but the really fun thing is that I’m working in the Denmark film town, right in with all the Dogma directors. During the process of editing then, most of these guys, like [Lars von] Trier and [Thomas] Vinterberg, would come in and help me edit and it was such a surreal experience, because it was clear that this was something very different.”
Arcel’s first film, King’s Game, was a political thriller, and much more in line with this Scandinavian tradition. “It was the success of that one that left me able to make something different this time,” Arcel explains. “After I’d finished it, I came to realise that this might be my only chance to make something expensive, so I decided to do something I’d dreamt of doing since I was a little kid, and that was an adventure film, which is basically what I had been brought up on…. I was really into those escapist fantasies like E.T. or Back to the Future – the kind that have an emotional, human story to them, with all these additional fantasy or supernatural elements.”
In Island of Lost Souls, this emotional core rests with the three central characters; Lulu, who has just moved into a small Denmark town with her recently-divorced mother, her new friend, Oliver, who is wrestling with his own family problems, and Hermann, the 19th Century soul who has possessed the body of Lulu’s younger brother, Sylvester. While the fantasy dimension evolves around them, Arcel’s characters remain firmly grounded in reality. They’re recognisable, relatable human beings, struggling to cope with these extraordinary events.
For Arcel, it was also important to position a strong female (Lulu) at the centre of the film. He ponders aloud: “I guess that shouldn’t be subversive, but maybe, sadly, you could see it that way. Certainly, here in Denmark, we have this tradition, this cliché, that every time you make this kind of fantasy film, even if it is for kids, it has to be about boys – boys having adventures. Most of my scripts have a girl as a main character, and I thought that just for once it would be good to make an action film with a girl at the centre, which was a very interesting challenge.”
Despite this all, however, Arcel maintains that he’s always seen his film as one for children. “I was actually sure that it would not be a particularly Festival-ish film,” he says. “I also never thought it would translate very well. Let’s say for you Australians, for example, you don’t have that pride of ‘Oh wow, they made a Danish adventure film,’ you don’t care about that! You have so many big great films of your own, and so many other English language films of the same sensibilities, so I did not think that this would travel so well. But then it’s always so hard to predict how your own films will be received.”
It’s definitely another unexpected choice for the Revelation programme, particularly as an opening night film. Then again, though, Revelation is far from your ordinary film festival. As Sargeant described it, “The festival is all about throwing people curve balls. I really wanted to have a family film on Day One, because people would never suspect that.”
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